Europe

When the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires tomorrow, the United States and Russia will, for the first time since the early 1970s, operate without a binding agreement limiting their strategic nuclear forces. That fact alone is striking. What is less obvious – and more consequential – is what the expiration reveals about the state of nuclear order in a world increasingly shaped by authoritarian ambition and multipolar competition. Signed in 2010, New START capped each side at 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and restricted the number of missiles and bombers that could carry them. Equally important were the verification provisions: inspections and data exchanges designed to reduce uncertainty and prevent worst-case assumptions.

President Trump has returned home from Davos, Switzerland, basking in the glow of his latest diplomatic Houdini act. For weeks, the President made Europe shudder with fear and sputter with rage as he abruptly escalated his demand for a total US takeover of Greenland. He said he was ready to launch an invasion or reignite a trade war to do it, even in the face of threats that such an act would destroy NATO. On Truth Social, the President shared a post suggesting NATO was a greater threat to America than Russia or China, along with AI slop depicting not just Greenland but also Canada under US dominion.

It began, as most things do under Donald Trump, with an idea that struck outside observers as a lark. An interested party – in this case, billionaire Ron Lauder – suggested to the President during his first term that the United States should acquire Greenland, a move that would represent the largest expansion of US territory since the purchase of Alaska from the Russians more than 150 years ago. The notion was reportedly considered and then left on the shelf, like so many ideas in Trump’s first term. Yet time away from the presidency gave it more resonance. Now the President is back on the case – and he seems very committed to the move, to the shock and horror of European observers who never took his Arctic ambitions seriously.

Boris Johnson has urged European leaders to hand $247 billion of frozen Russian central bank assets to Ukraine – but says he fears they “lack the courage” to do so, in an interview with The Spectator. The former British prime minister also warned that Trump is at risk of “morally polluting” himself if he caves to Putin’s demands in peace negotiations and encouraged his negotiating team to stop the “nauseating deals” they are discussing about joint business ventures.“I think Europe is at a very difficult point because Europe has got to do the reparations alone,” Johnson said. “And I'm worried that they lack the courage. They must do it. I think that's the only way to get the Americans to take Europe seriously.

No one ever tucked themselves up in bed to read a government document – at least not in the expectation of enjoying it. The standard format is one of hundreds of pages of impenetrable jargon yielding no more than nuggets of significant ideas. The Trump administration has admirably cut through that tendency to produce a National Security Strategy (NSS) that is worth reading: a coherent outlining of America’s strategic intentions on the world stage. Originally composed by Michael Anton, a brilliant mind who is sadly leaving the State Department, the document concisely lays out a Trumpian vision of America’s role in the 21st century.

Earlier this year, a striking 28-year-old woman, dressed head to toe in a vivid shade of crimson, stepped up to the podium at a conference in Hungary. “Ladies and gentlemen: hello Budapest. I’m so thrilled to be here again,” she began, adjusting the twin microphones and gently swiping a strand of long blonde hair from her forehead. “As some of you might remember, last year I gave here a speech as well, about the ‘great replacement,’” she continued, confidently glancing around the assembled audience. “I wanted the whole world to know that the ‘great replacement theory’ was, in fact, not a theory, but reality. White people are becoming a minority in their own homelands at an exceptionally fast rate.

With his owlish expression and affable manner, Nick Thomas-Symonds looks more like the academic that he was, rather than the political bomb disposal expert he has become. Brexit is the greatest political issue for a generation, yet Keir Starmer has chosen to put this softly spoken Welshman in charge of defusing it. The Cabinet Office minister, responsible for post-Brexit negotiations with the EU, is following in the footsteps of Olly Robbins and David Frost, but his lack of public notoriety says much about how things have changed as we approach the tenth anniversary next year of the vote to Leave.